WASHINGTON – In a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Capitol Hill
about the Guantánamo military commissions Tuesday, Justice Department official
David Kris testified that the Due Process Clause of the Constitution should
indeed apply to the commissions system. However, in other testimony, Defense
Department official Jeh Johnson stated that the United States can continue to
indefinitely hold detainees who have been acquitted of crimes.

In further hearings today before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the
Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, American Civil Liberties Union
attorney Denny LeBoeuf testified that the military commissions are inherently
unconstitutional and cannot be fixed.

The following can be attributed to Christopher Anders, ACLU Senior
Legislative Counsel:

"For the first time ever in a public setting, a Justice Department official
testified that the Due Process Clause of the Constitution applies to the
military commissions at Guantánamo and, as a result, that coerced evidence must
be barred from military commission trials. But it is too late to fix this
irreparable system that flies in the face of the most basic principles of our
democracy and justice system. The military commissions system was set up to
circumvent the law and the Constitution in order to achieve easy convictions,
not to provide justice, and the results of such a sham system will never be
legitimate. The only way for America to live up to its highest ideals is for the
president to commit to ending the Guantánamo military commissions, trying
detainees suspected of a crime in our federal court system, and resettling or
repatriating those who are not charged and tried."

The following can be attributed to Jameel Jaffer, Director of the ACLU
National Security Project:

"Continuing to detain a person indefinitely without charge or trial for a
crime for which he has been acquitted is absurd and unconstitutional. If the
government has sufficient evidence to warrant criminal charges against prisoners
held at Guantánamo, it should file those charges and prosecute the prisoners in
ordinary federal courts. But the government should not be holding prisoners
indefinitely without charge or trial, and it should certainly not be holding
show trials from which guilty verdicts will be honored but acquittals will be
ignored. The suggestion that the government can protect the country only by
disregarding the Constitution is an extremely dangerous one that should be
unequivocally rejected."